A Drop of History 101

The incestuous kings of Spain
For 500 years they married only their nieces and cousins

If someone walks the endless corridors of the Palacio Real, in Madrid, which is adorned with the portraits of the kings who ruled the country over the last five hundred years, they will certainly observe some strange similarities concerning their faces. Almost all of them are repulsively ugly, despite the portraitists’ best efforts, while several bear uncanny resemblances. Nothing is accidental.

The Habsburgs and the Bourbons, who have ruled that great kingdom from the great colonial age till today, were obsessed with shielding the state against any foreign infiltration, and as a result, they married only within the narrow circle of their family. For centuries, without exception, all the mighty Spanish kings chose their wives among their cousins, nieces or aunts. Naturally, this continuous inbreeding brought to the world sick, deformed and mentally challenged children, who, in turn, would again marry their relatives, to further the degenerative process.

Joanna of Castile was the daughter of Isabella and Ferdinand, who were first cousins. Joanna of Castile was mad. Philip the Handsome, who was crowned in 1496, was also the son of two cousins, and hideously deformed, with a domed forehead and a massive underbite. The marriage of deformed Philip and mad Joanna produced Charles V, who inherited both his father’s underbite and his mother’s madness. He was the most powerful king in the known world, but his lower lip jutted out so much that he was unable to chew, he drooled incessantly and his speech was an endless stutter.

He had a son by his cousin Isabella of Portugal, Philip II, who was even more hideous than his father. Massive prognathism, advanced arthritis since childhood, asthma and persecution mania were Philip’s companions during his reign. Still, of his four wives, two were his cousins [Manuela of Portugal and Mary Tudor] and another, his niece [Anna of Austria]. His first son, Charles (Don Carlos) was a rachitic, mentally retarded hunchback. His insane father had him killed. But the second son, Philip III, was not better. Half-mad and ugly as sin, he refused to rule and left the field free to all sorts of thieves and swindlers, accelerating the decline of the Spanish empire. He married his cousin, Margaret of Austria, and had a son, Philip IV, who was quite the erotomaniac. He fathered bastards left, right and centre, and acknowledged eight of them.

Philip IV married his niece, Mariana of Austria, daughter of Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand III. By that time, the connections between relatives had become so convoluted, through marriage after marriage, that Mariana was her husband’s niece on her father’s side and her husband’s son’s first cousin on her mother’s side. Absolute chaos. The union of Philip the satyr and his niece produced Charles II, who, unlike his father, was infertile. He married two cousins of his, but had no children. The line of incest continued on the women’s side. The course of family blood through the centuries without genetic renewal was so complex that Alfonso XIII, grandfather of current king Juan Carlos, looked like a twin of Charles V, who had reigned twenty generations earlier, since he had been born in 1500. A comparison of Alfonso’s photographs with Charles’ portraits proves it clearly.

This horrible chain was finally broken with the marriage of current King Juan Carlos to Princess Sophia of Greece. But is this union enough to renew five hundred years of royal degeneration?

© Dimitris Kambourakis 2003, All Rights Reserved
Translation from the Greek © M.A.K. 2008, All Rights Reserved

A Drop of History 100

The State of God
A groundbreaking experiment in Latin America

The first Jesuits set foot on the Americas in 1572, with instructions from their order to bring the faith of God to the worlds that Columbus had discovered eighty years earlier. The situation they faced was indescribable in every way possible. Vast expanses of land had been given by the Spanish crown to nobles who had come from Europe, while the local population of natives had become slaves wholesale. The natives were not considered humans and the brutality of the Spanish towards them was proverbial. The population shrank at an alarming rate: In 1519 there were 11 million Indians in Mexico; in 1540 they were reduced to 6.5 million; in 1565, to 4.2 million; in 1650, to 1.5 million. A literal slaughter.

That was the situation the Jesuits found. Now one will ask, since the Jesuits are documented as the worst of all papists, why should they mind? That is an error. A grave historical error. If the term “Jesuit” today means a crafty, shifty, guileful, hypocritical intrigant, that is because, in the course of history, the arguments that prevailed were those of the calumniators of the amazing order found by Ignatius de Loyola. Naturally, it was an order created to aid the efforts of the Counter-Reformation to suppress Protestantism in favour of the Catholic faith and the Vatican, but it did so using methods consistent with faith in God. Unlike the Dominicans and Franciscans, the Jesuits were never involved with the Inquisition.

The three Jesuit vows were poverty, chastity and obedience, and their principal modus operandi was founding and managing schools, aware that education – and not intrigue or religious suppression – would form the basis for their views to eventually prevail. The suppression of the order by Pope Clement XIV in 1773 automatically meant the closing of 1800 colleges with 15,000 Jesuit teachers, all over Europe. One can imagine how many hundreds of thousands of students those colleges taught. Obviously, not all Jesuits were saints; after all, they had become involved in the power machine of the Vatican. Still, the average membership was much better than that of other orders, that were spared historical condemnation.

One of the most characteristic examples of the beneficial influence of the Jesuits was the famous State of God, which they founded in a vast area of what is modern Paraguay. They ventured into the rainforests, where the Indians had fled to escape the slavers, and, armed only with their musical instruments, which enthralled the natives, they started founding incredible self-governing communities [reductions], in an effort to create the ideal state of God.

Each reduction had a church, school, conservatory (the Jesuits were very fond of music), orchards, vineyards, vegetable gardens, grain fields, patches of sugar cane, tea and cotton, pastures with cattle, sheep and horses, foundries for metal constructions, lime kilns, mills and warehouses. Each member of the community had all the food they wanted, wore whatever they wanted, and all goods were communal, “God’s things”. There was no money, no guards, no capital punishment. Only the traditional native polygamy was forbidden, and the consumption of alcohol, which the slavers were trying to peddle in order to push them towards degeneration.

The State of God survived for six generations; over 1.5 million natives lived there, under the Jesuits’ guidance. It is referred to as one of the most wonderful and idyllic periods of Latin American history, as its 700 schools produced, after the first generation, a great number of illustrious teachers and artists. Works of art (painting and sculpture) from the reductions adorn the museums of modern Paraguay, while the theatre was so developed that it is classified as a special page in the world history of folk drama.

The reductions held out for 150 years, surrounded by great landowners who coveted more land and slaver gangs who were always looking for more of their distasteful merchandise. The system collapsed only after the Vatican intrigues and the religious and political clashes in Europe led to the suppression of the Jesuit Order. Spanish troops stormed in and the Jesuits who were heads of the communities were arrested and imprisoned. The Spanish king divided the land among nobles and instantly transformed the natives into slaves. Those had grown up in a system of freedom and justice, so the new brutal reality decimated them. The noble landowners took the flourishing communities and applied to them the well-known brutal methods that prevailed in the rest of Latin America. A census carried out in the colonies twenty-one years later, in 1794, showed that the local population was reduced by 75%.

Still, Pope Clement XIV, who had been trapped into suppressing the Jesuit Order, tried to revoke his initial decision, but never managed it. On his deathbed he lamented, “I cut off my own right hand.”

© Dimitris Kambourakis 2003, All Rights Reserved
Translation from the Greek © M.A.K. 2008, All Rights Reserved

A Drop of History 58

The fifth column
A synonym for treachery active in Madrid

On 2 October 1936, a group of journalists who followed the fascist troops of general Franco on their march towards Madrid, against the legitimate government, who had barricaded the city, interviewed the commander of the fascist troops in northern Spain, General Emilio Mola. Mola expressed his certainty that very soon he would be having coffee on the Gran Vía, as four military columns closed around the city: two from the north, under Generals Juan de Yague and José Varela, and two from the west, under Colonels Eli Rolando de Tella and Carlos Acento. To the classic journalistic question about which of the four columns would enter Madrid first, Mola answered with a phrase that went down in history: “Madrid will be taken by the fifth column, which is already in.”

Ever since, the fifth column became a synonym for treachery. “Traitors within a country, working in the enemy’s interest” is the dictionary definition. Indeed, within barricaded Madrid, the fascists had built an exceptionally well organised network of action, with the purpose of undermining the city’s internal front. Government officers and soldiers who secretly supported Franco, citizens who appeared to go about their business, merchants, lawyers, engineers, old nobles and their servants would turn up in the streets of Madrid at night, demolishing everything in their way.

They blew up barricades, trashed shops, cleared out entire neighbourhoods, and disappeared. Murders and tortures were daily occurrences. Shots from behind closed shutters felled unsuspecting citizens indiscriminately. “While the enemy is officially kept outside Madrid, eighty-four killings took place in the streets in a single day,” wrote the Morning Star correspondent. Eduardo Grieg reported to the Times at Christmas 1936: “Widespread massacres are perpetrated by officers and civilians of the fifth column. Not only killings, but also tortures and maimings of elders, women and children. They have their eyes gouged out or their tongues cut off. Some are burned alive, others crucified.”

Dozens of buildings were blown up by the fifth column’s bombs, including the seat of the government and the Florida hotel, where the journalists were staying. Ernest Hemingway, who was there as war correspondent, was in the hotel, but walked out unharmed by the explosion. The fifth columnists had made black shirts and skirts, which they wore at night when they went forth to spread terror around. But their most important service was the disclosure of the republicans’ defence plans to the attackers. Colonel Garija and Lieutenant Colonel Ortega, who participated in the republican command, belonged to the fifth column and passed all the plans to the fascists, who were preparing to attack.

On 7 November, the day set for the great attack, the fifth column ordered its members to undermine the defences. Thousands of Franco’s supporters left their defensive positions and defected to the attackers. Despite that, Madrid did not fall under that attack, because it was defended by the famous International Brigades, which were formed by volunteers from all over the world.

On the other hand, the republicans and communists, together with their Russian advisors, reacted with appalling brutality. Anyone considered a fifth columnist was summarily executed, without a trial and without much of an inquest. Children and teenagers were gunned down, charged with collaboration with the enemy, while in the barracks officers and common soldiers were killed on mere suspicions of doing something reprehensible, which was considered sabotaging. A fifth column leader, right-wing lawyer Juan Sotolo, was arrested, tortured in public and shot, after having both legs cut off at the knees. Many foreign sympathisers with the republican struggle left Spain then, disgusted by the bloodbath on both sides.

After Franco prevailed, Adolph Hitler, who was preparing to start World War II, sent advisors to Spain in order to study the methods of the fifth column, with the purpose of implementing them himself. And he did. In December 1939, Hitler summoned the leader of a small Norwegian fascist party and tasked him with a mission following the fifth column model. Special forces in civilian clothes, who had infiltrated Oslo, occupied the centre of the city and their fascist leader promptly called in the German troops for protection. Oslo fell into Hitler’s lap without a single gunshot, and historical dictionaries added another entry as a synonym for treachery, next to the fifth column: the name of Norwegian fascist Quisling.

© Dimitris Kambourakis 2003, All Rights Reserved
Translation from the Greek © M.A.K. 2007, All Rights Reserved